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Homelessness Is Not A Crime: Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Creation of The State Home and School for Children, 1875-1885

Elizabeth C. Stevens

Elizabeth Buffum Chace, preeminent Rhode Island reformer, was a radical activist
whose life spanned the entire nineteenth century.(She was born in 1806 and
died in 1899.) Chace entered public life as a member of the ultra-ist Garrisonian
antislavery movement in the 1830's. The Garrisonians, a small group of abolitionists
were the most uncompromising antislavery activists in calling for the IMMEDIATE
emancipation of slaves and were considered dangerous radicals who threatened
the social order. After the official end of slavery during the Civil War,
along with other Garrisonian abolitionists, Chace turned her immense energies
to woman suffrage, then also a radical "far-out" cause. Co-founder
of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association in 1868, and president from
1870 until her death in 1899 at the age of 93, Chace advocated not only for
votes for women, but for rights for indigent persons, prostitutes, prison
inmates, factory workers-especially woman and children, for temperance reform,
the admission of women to institutions of higher education, prison reform
and many other causes, including the establishment of a State Home and School
for Dependent Children. Known for her incisive letters to the Providence
Journal and other newspapers on subjects as diverse as lotteries, the opening
of Roger Williams Park to working men and women on Sundays, and the double
standard in which prostitutes were arrested while their clients went free,
and for her articulate testimony at legislative hearings, Chace was widely
acknowledged to be, in the decades following the Civil War, "the conscience
of Rhode Island."

In her private life, Elizabeth Buffum Chace was the wife of textile manufacturer
Samuel Chace who owned mills in and around Valley Falls, Rhode Island. Chace
was also a mother. Her first five children died between the ages of 2 and
9, of various diseases; three of them died of scarlet fever. She was childless
for several months in 1843, before giving birth to her sixth child, four
more followed; the youngest, her daughter, Mary was born in 1852, when Chace
was 45 years old. Chace's grief following the deaths of her children was
formative; it impelled her, in 1843, to reject the Quakerism in which she
had been bred and married, and to embrace the extreme and unpopular radical
Garrisonian activism as her religion. She converted the helplessness she
felt at the bedsides of her own dying children into activism on behalf of
other suffering children who could be helped. Uncompromsing, unwavering,
iconoclastic, it was said of Elizabeth Buffum Chace after her death by labor
organizer Frederic Hinckley, that wherever an issue of justice was concerned,
she rose above mere class considerations. [General information on Elizabeth
Buffum Chace from Elizabeth C. Stevens, ' From Generation to Generation':
The Mother and Daughter Activism of Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace
Wyman. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Publishers, forthcoming; the
book is also available in a different format as a Ph.D. dissertation, Brown
University, 1993.]

In this brief comment on Elizabeth Buffum Chace and her vision for the State
Home and School for Children in Rhode Island, I would like to focus on several
points. First, I will describe the nineteenth century culture in which Elizabeth
Buffum Chace's worldview was formed. Then, I will examine briefly why Chace
felt that the establishment of a state home and school for children was essential
in Rhode Island. Finally, I will present Chace's hopes and dreams for the
organization of the State Home and School, and the main arguments she used
to persuade legislators and the public of the need for such an institution.
All quotations are taken from Elizabeth Buffum Chace's own scrapbook of newspaper
clippings of her public endeavours; the scrapbook is now at the John Hay
Library, Brown University.

Nineteenth-century middle class American culture has been described as one
of spheres separated by gender. Men dominated in the bruising public marketplace
of politics and commerce; women reigned in the domestic "private" sphere,
creating in their homes a "haven in a heartless world," where children
were nurtured and reared to be pious, obedient, industrious, exemplary citizens.
In this domestic sphere the role of the mother was paramount. I have found
in my research on Elizabeth Buffum Chace, that despite her radical Garrisonian
activism which rejected not only slavery, but organized religion, and the
United States Constitution, these cultural norms on gender were held as gospel.
Radical female antislavery activists like Chace urged northern women, as
mothers, to take to the streets, on behalf of slave mothers and their children,
they encouraged mothers to train their own children to be activists, and
they fervently believed in the power of woman to accomplish social change
from her domestic hearth. Within this framework, the concept of "home," as
a domestic haven where children were protected, educated and nourished, was
paramount. Elizabeth Buffum Chace never abandoned or even amended these cultural
norms and they dominated her public ideas and her public activism.

After the Civil War, female reformers like Elizabeth Buffum Chace became keenly
aware of the great changes wrought on the social landscape of Rhode Island
by rapid urbanization and the massive waves of foreign and native-born people
flooding into the cities and towns seeking work. Fluctuations in the economic
markets and mistreatment at the hands of unscrupulous and unrestrained capitalists
caused unemployment, poverty and suffering, on a scale never before seen
in the state. The Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association took a keen interest
in the condition of women inmates in state jails and prisons. In the early
1870's, women from the Suffrage Association lobbied the governor to appoint
a "Board of Women Visitors" to institutions like the state prison,
where women were resident. Six women, among them Elizabeth Buffum Chace,
spent several years in the early 1870's visiting and reporting on conditions
in state institutions regarding women and girls.

Her experience on the State Board of Women Visitors led Chace and her colleagues
to identify a group of children who were in need of particular attention.
These were children whose parents were unable to adequately care for them. "Those
children, found to be without means of support and proper care, through the
intemperance, crime, incapacity or death of one or both parents" Chace
wrote, in describing this class of children. ["The State School," undated
newspaper clipping, EBC Scrapbook, Brown University Library] She gave the
example of a man in Pawtucket who had murdered his wife in a fit of anger,
and had three small children. "Who would care for these children?" she
queried in a letter to the Providence Journal in the mid-1870's. ["State
Public School," undated newspaper clipping, EBC Scrapbook] There was "a
large and constantly increasing class of children [who had been] left without
natural protectors," Elizabeth Buffum Chace asserted at this time. ["State
Public School," undated newspaper clipping ca. 1876? EBC Scrapbook,
Brown University Library] When Chace wrote or spoke of these children, she
used words like "innocent, destitute, forsaken, neglected, abandoned." Chace
accepted without question that this group of children, thrown on the resources
of society through no fault of their own, were the wards of the state and
that it was the duty of the state to care for them. [ibid.]

In the 1870s,
Chace inquired, what were the arrangements made for such children? Many were
sent to almshouses in their towns, or to the newly opened State
Almshouse in Cranston, where impoverished citizens lived. Other destitute
children were placed at the Rhode Island Reform School on the grounds of
the State Farm in Cranston. Chace rejected both the almshouse and the reform
school as appropriate placements for these children on two grounds. One was
that the stigma associated in the public's mind with such institutions would
harm children's opportunities to lead full productive lives. Further, she
asserted that it was was unjust to send children innocent of any wrongdoing
to the reform school where the regimen presupposed a need of "correction." She
feared that by associating with troubled older children who were themselves
potential criminals, perfectly "innocent" children would be led
down a similar path, and themselves turn to a life of mischief, wrongdoing,
and criminality. If such children did turn to a criminal life and ended up
being incarcerated behind bars, Chace asked, who would be the real offenders,
the young persons who committed the crimes or the legislators and citizens
of the state who did not adequately and properly ensure that, these neglected
children had a chance to lead wholesome and productive lives. ["The
Industrial School," undated newspaper clipping, EBC Scrapbook, Brown
University Library]

Elizabeth Buffum Chace's solution to the necessity to care for indigent children
in Rhode Island was to create a model institution, variously referred to
as, "The State Industrial School," "The State Home and School," and
simply "The State School." Modeled after a school opened by the
state of Michigan in 1871, the Rhode Island state school would be an institution
where children were nurtured and educated by kind, loving adults. As a home,
Chace proposed, "it shall be so pleasant that it never can be regarded
as a place of restraint, any more than any well-ordered home is so regarded." And,
as a school, it would be "as respectable to be an inmate of it as attendant
of any district school." ["The State School," undated newspaper
clipping, EBC Scrapbook, Brown University Library] It would be a place where
children would receive training in a trade or profession, according to their
abilities and interests, where she maintained, they would become "useful
artisans and citizens." ["The Proposition on an Industrial School" undated
newspaper clipping, ca. 1874? EBC Scrapbook] She abhored the system at the
Reform School where girls were trained only in housework. "No girl should
be kept peeling potatoes or washing dishes who has the making of a good bookkeeper
or fine wood carver or engraver; no boy should spend his minority in cane-seating
chairs if he has a genius for architecture or any higher mechanical labor," she
asserted [Ibid.]

And critically, there would be no stigma attached to attending such an institution.
It should be a place, she maintained, where any parent in the state would
be satisfied to send their children to school. In the era of economic upturns
and downturns in which they lived, she argued, "We have none of us arrived
at that elevation in human life from which there is no possibility of descent
for ourselves or our posterity. So, in providing for an establishment of
this kind, it is well for us to consider what sort of a place we should choose
for our own or our children's children should they ever come to need its
protection and its fostering care... " ["The Industrial School," undated
newspaper article by EBC, EBC Scrapbook, John Hay Library, Brown University]

Elizabeth Buffum Chace was very specific about her vision for the State Home
and School. It should be both a school and a home "entirely free and
separate from all penal and pauper influences", "wholly educational
in its character" and "wholly respectable." ["The Industrial
School," undated newspaper clipping, EBC Scrapbook, Brown University
Library] I'll read excerpts from an article Chace published in a local newspaper
in August, 1877 which laid out her physical conception of the school. The
State Home and School should be located "near the city of Providence
. . but it should also be in the country, that there may be plenty of room,
pure air, and freedom for large variety in out-door exercise. That the life
in it may be as much as possible like family life, I would have it built
in this wise," she wrote. "There should be a large, plain central
building, in which should be kitchen, laundry, dining-room, school-rooms,
workship, hall and sleeping rooms for adult persons employed therein. Then
the plan should be to build a circle of cottages around the central house,
all facing toward it, with plenty of space between them for free circulation
of air, and also between them and the central building for a large play ground,
and avenues. It would be necessary only to begin with one or two cottages
with the design of increasing them in numbers as the wants of the institution
demanded. In each cottage I would place a good woman and a certain number
of children; and this should be their home when not engaged at school, or
meals or work. When not employed in the general or particular duties of the
institution, under special or general superintendence, each household of
children should be under the care of the matron of its own cottage, who should,
as nearly as possible, supply the place of a mother to them. The whole establishment
should be under the general care of a superintendent and head matron, who
should also live in a cottage in the circle, in order to have the whole institution
under their eyes."

"On the land outside of the cottages," Chace wrote, "I would
have little gardens for the employment of the children at suitable times,
and in the workshop, facilities for various mechanical operations, whereby
the peculiar genius of each child might be developed and something done toward
their support; and where they could prepare to enter the industrial, self-supporting
world when they go hence. In the school-room, I would give them a solid,
practical education, on the system of half-time schools, found so beneficial
in the manufacturing districts of England ... " she observed. Indeed,
Chace wrote, the school should provide such an education and training that
its excellent reputation would provide an outstanding reference for any former
pupil seeking employment in Rhode Island. ["The Prevention of Pauperism
and Crime," 27 August 1877, newspaper clipping from EBC Scrapbook]

[She did not envisualize the school as a "permanent home," however.
She wrote that, "whereever and whenever a positively good place can
be found for a child, he should be transferred thither. But there should
be great care exercised herein, and when no unexceptionable situations offer,
I would have the education completed inside the institution."]

Chace argued for the creation of such a benevolent institution on the grounds
of "safety, economy, and justice." ["Report of Board of visitors
to Penal and Correctional Institutions of the State," undated newspaper
clipping, EBC Scrapbook, John Hay Library, Brown University.] The school
would benefit the children themselves who would grow into self-supporting
prosperous citizens. They would add to the well-being of the state and its
economic and social progress by providing skilled labor for the Rhode Island.
Second, (and she used this argument many times in trying to convince legislators
and the public of the economy of the school), by nurturing virtuous and upstanding
citizens from childhood, the state would have less need for penal and correctional
institutions, and would save funds that would almost undoubtedly have to
be spent on erecting and maintaining jails and prisons.. ["Memorial
of Elizabeth Buffum Chace to the Senate and House of Representatives, General
Assembly of Rhode Island, 22 February 1880," EBC Scrapbook, Brown University
Library] Chace ended her arguments by emphasizing that the ultimate persuasive
issue was one of justice: "But aside from all considerations of economy
and public safety, we owe[emphasis mine] to these children, destitute of
proper care from natural guardians, an oversight, protection and education,
such as can no longer be justifiably withheld or neglected," she argued.
["The Proposition for an Industrial School," undated newspaper
clipping, EBC Scrapbook, Brown University Library]

As I mentioned previously,
critical to Chace's conception of the State Home and School was her deep
conviction that no stigma should be attached to residence
or attendance there. When the school was first proposed, location of the
school became a central issue. For this reason, the ultimate place where
the school was built, on state land off Smith Street and Mt. Pleasant Avenue,on
what is now the Rhode Island College campus, is as historically important
as any fact about its conception. Many legislators admitted the need for
such an institution, but argued that, for economic reasons, it should be
constructed on the grounds of the State Farm where the almshouse, reform
school, prison and other state institutions were located. Elizabeth Buffum
Chace was adamant that to build a State Home and School for dependent children
on the grounds of the State Farm would be to subvert its entire purpose.
She held that the school MUST be located entirely separately, at best some
miles away from the state farm, so that in the public's mind, it would not
be associated with correctional or [punitive] institutions of any kind.["The
Industrial School," undated newspaper clipping, EBC Scrapbook, Brown
University Library] Ultimately, Chace's view prevailed, and the School was
constructed in Providence, several miles away from the "odium of the
State Farm." ["Brayton Farm School," undated newspaper clipping,
EBC Scrapbook, Brown University Library]

Elizabeth Buffum Chace's principal role in the creation of the State Home
and School was in its conception and creation. Tragically her ideal conception
was far from realized. She was just short of eighty years old and in failing
health when the School was built in 1885, and her attention turned the following
year to a statewide referendum for woman suffrage, which she directed from
her bedroom, where she was confined by illness. Despite her failing health,
Chace visited the school several times a year after it opened, "made
some inspection of the buildings, and talked with the officers [officials]
and children." She was unaware of problems at the state school, including
lack of food and, especially, corporal punishment of the children. When informed,
in 1889 by a worker at the school that children were being mistreated there,
Chace's daughter later wrote: "The shock and the horror that the old
woman felt can only be imagined. But she bestirred herself at once, and one
of the Providence` papers said that the mere fact that Mrs. Chace believed
there was something wrong in the State School was sufficient reason why an
investigation should be made. She girded herself up for what was to be her
last great personal conflict with official authorities, but it was difficult,
at first, to obtain an investigation" into allegations of misdeeds at
the newly opened school."

[Chace noted that the initial report of the investigating committee seemed
to find little wrong with the behavior of the superitendent, Martin Healy,
who was accused of beating children and squeezing their windpipes to prevent
their crying. " It seems very strange to me that intelligent men cannot
see that a man who could from choice treat children in this manner is incapable
of employing any wiser or more humane measures," Chace commented. Chace
herself gave formal testimony at the hearings into Healy's behavior. She
made a statement at the end: "The evidence of numerous witnesses, including
Mr. Healy himself, has shown that the design of the school has been to a
great extent subverted by the methods adopted for its management. The treatment
of the children has been harsh and cruel, the punishments astonishingly frequent
and severe, and often inflicted where there was no blame or responsibility
resting on the child. What I consider the worst feature in this case has
been that the idea has pervaded the management, and been impressed on the
children, that they belong to an exceptionally degraded and depraved class--in
short, that they are thoroughly bad, and that they are paupers and must be
set apart from other children. Had the design been to hold them down, to
keep them low, to make certain their degradation, no surer methods could
have been devised... [badness] "cannot be whipped or knocked or choked
out," Chace wrote. "The cruel blows, the tortures inflicted upon
the children, have hardened and degraded them and kept them down; the patches
on their clothes have symbolized the patches on their minds; and altogether
their treatment has made them what Mr. Healy describes some of them to be
..."

"The newspapers at the time report that what Mrs. Chace said at the hearing
was received with profound attention; they describe her as being 'draped
in black, looking exceedingly pleasant"; they speak of her great age
with a little evident wonder that she could endure the fatigue of the sessions... " As
a result of the investigation Healy and his wife were discharged, and a new
man and woman placed there by the State Board of Education. In 1891, "in
response to numerous petitions for a change of management, the Home and School
was taken from the Board of Education and consigned to a special Board, to
be composed of four men and three women... Governor Herbert Ladd... appointed
an excellent Board, without regard to party or creed." [Excerpts from
Elizabeth Buffum Chace 1806-1899 Her Life and Its Environment, vol. 2: 242-248]]

Steeped in a culture that revered the dominance of the "home" and
the power of the "mother" to create worthy, industrious citizens,
Elizabeth Buffum Chace used her activist skills to advocate for indigent,
neglected and abused children in Rhode Island. Her vision of a State Home
and School that literally re-created a home setting with "mothers" in
cottages to care for the children reflected her own activist belief in the
power of woman to redeem the downtrodden. There is no doubt that her continual
lobbying efforts in the Providence press, and in legislative committee hearings,
brought the debate on the care of destitute children to a more compassionate
place. Elizabeth Buffum Chace's insistence that indigent children were not
to blame for their condition, and that they should be cared for in a manner
consistent with upholding their dignity and personhood was crucial. That
such children should not be punished for their condition was a key underpinning
of her theory. "Homelessness is not a crime," she asserted in a
newspaper article advocating for her vision of the school. ["The Reform
School," undated newspaper clipping, EBC Scrapbook, Brown University
Library] Her impulse to protect vulnerable children from the stigma which
could be associated with their condition was a critical piece of Chace's
philosophy. That is why she fought so tenaciously to have the school located
in a setting apart from public institutions on the State Farm which were
associated with shame and criminality. The location of the remaining building
and ruins of the Rhode Island State Home and School, now being excavated,
are a testament to this woman's vision of a state that would truly care for
and nurture its most vulnerable citizens, by creating a model institution
for change. When her idealistic concept for the State Home and School was
first suggested, Chace later remembered, "much contempt was cast upon
a project of giving to dependent children a pleasant, happy home." ["Children
of the State," undated newspaper clipping, EBC Scrapbook, Brown University
Library] If her unwavering faith in a state institution as the agent of change
seems archaic to us today, Elizabeth Buffum Chace's defiant response to those
who would deny indigent children the right to enjoy the pursuit of happiness
ring uneasily in our ears in 2003: "If a pleasant and happy home helps
to make good men and women of the favored sons and daughters of worthy and
well-to-do parents," Chace said, "how much more do those need it,
who have begun life under the most unfavorable circumstances! And what can
the expense of a good training for such children weigh against the enormous
out-lay we make to build reform schools, alms-houses and prisons...? [ ibid]

To learn more about the project contact Patricia Nolin, Special Assistant
to the President, call (401) 456-9854, or email pnolin@ric.edu.

To contribute to the oral history project contact Diane Martell at
dmartell@ric.edu
(email) or 401-456-8628 (phone).

Documentary Video

The documentary, "Honoring the Past to Ensure the Future," tells
the complete history of the Rhode Island State Home and School. Segments
from the video are available for download here.see video segments here